Safest and most probable answer to original question is probably he probably got some of it right, and undoubtedly some of it wrong.
Was Einstein Wrong?
- Thread starter munty13
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Well that's odd.
Not so long ago it was the rate of perception that changed the colours we see not the size of the creature.
Make your mind up...
And then forget it and go to school.
Wouldnt the rods and cones shrink too ther by keeping the same light spectrum in view?
"According to Einstein the speed of light in a vacuum is 300,000 km/s. It takes light travelling from the Sun, 9 minutes to reach our planet. Imagine then that we have two observers watching the night-sky from my backyard. In this experiment we are going to turn on a torch from the position of the Sun, 150 million kilometres away, and then we shall ask both our observers to make their own steady, ticking head-count to imitate a clock (1...2...3...4...) - and to count the time it takes for the light travel to Earth. One of the observers I shall take into my laboratory (think Weird Science), and shrink to a size where the distance travelled by signals in his brain are halved. We are effectively accelerating his brain's shutter speed to being twice as fast as normal, so that the brain is able to communicate with itself at a speed which is twice that of ours, and his mind will produce twice the amount of conscious thoughts."
Why not? It worked for the guy in AC/DC.
Speed is distance/time. Increase or reduce time & distance proportionately and the speed doesn't change.
In essence you're saying the brain in our current state (size) processes thoughts much quicker and sees less of the spectrum than if we were proportionately larger. So as hominids evolved and brains and other anatomical attributes became bigger then it stands to reason that our proportionately smaller ancestors saw less of the spectrum but could process thoughts quicker than modern man.
If our ancestors processed thoughts quicker, then they did it with less information(smaller spectrum slice). Therefore more information (larger spectrum slice) requires slower thought processes or more time to do it. More time would mean that the distance for a piece of information to travel from receptor to brain would increase, a consequence of the larger brain I believe you are intimating in your hypothesis.
Instead of messing with Einstein you may have inadvertently stumbled upon a previously unthought of cause for evolutionary brain size increase and intelligence that relates to light.
Is it more complicated and/or advantageous for a brain to process the visible end of the spectrum than say UV or Infrared?
Hey! WTF do I know? It sounded good when I typed it. Stand to be corrected.
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I've understood exactly what you are saying. As a point against relativity, it's a straw man.
The vagueness of this concept aside (unless you can make meaningful quantitative comparisons between individuals), it's irrelevant. Special relativity is concerned with the invariance of the speed of light in different situations - ie. in reference frames in motion, translated, or rotated with respect to one another. As with any other physical theory, "all else being equal" is implicitly assumed: if, while looking at a ray of light, you die and are reincarnated as an iguana moving with respect to the human corpse you leave behind, you may well judge the speed of light to seem faster or slower than before (I don't know; I have no experience of being an iguana), but the relevant point is that this would be completely due to your new physiology, which isn't the subject of relativity (relativity asserts Poincaré invariance; the Poincaré group doesn't include "physiology transformations").
If you consider "this moment" as the only one existing in isolation, you lose the concepts of rate and velocity altogether.
No moment can exist in isolation. Each is inextricably connected to the next.
The velocity at any given moment is the instantaneous velocity.